Activity

The wedding was two hours outside of Boston in a bookshop that used to be a sawmill. We rented a car and Cyrus drove and we listened to Jeff Buckley singing “Hallelujah,” which put me in a very somber mood even though I was wearing my most cheerful outfit, a red tunic which was one half of a matchi…

The metamorphosis was this: I was no longer the awkward new kid at school with the smelly lunchbox. I had taken the heaviness of my childhood—the story of my parents and their exile and those years above the pharmacy and all the striving I had to swallow—and I had turned it into fire-breathing. I w…

We talked about the intervening years. After his mother died, he had gone to live with an aunt. He didn’t finish high school. He backpacked around Mexico, and then he helped to organize a copper miners’ union in Chile, and after that he had taught English in Ecuador before returning to America. He …

Afterward, he found me in the cafeteria nibbling through a sandwich. “We kept in touch,” he said. “After I dropped out. She would call me and check that I was reading enough Shakespeare. She told me everything else was optional.”

By the simple fact of existing for eighteen years, a farmers’ movement that contests the ruling class in this country can consider itself something of a triumph—it’s longer than any previous one has lasted. We’ve won some economic victories: the lives of the 350,000 families that have occupied land…